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The Sport of Beach Volleyball
Is a Soap Opera in the Sand

By

John Helyar Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Updated July 24, 1996 12:40 a.m. ET

Beach volleyball players may frolic about on sugar-white sand. They may have bronzed bodies to die for. They may play on tours where the purses are even more handsome than their pecs. Yet for the athletes in this new Olympic sport, life is not a beach.

Ask the No. 1 U.S. women's team of Holly McPeak and Nancy Reno, whose problem-plagued partnership illustrates a central dynamic of this game: teams' constant breakups, makeups and heartaches. It could be argued that beach volleyball's tour sponsors shouldn't be Miller Lite...